BY the summer of next year, Singaporean university students will have the opportunity to spend three months of their academic year participating in an internship in an exotic locale: the Middle East.
Yesterday afternoon, Young Arab Leaders (YAL) chief executive Assem O Kabeesh and Ho Kwon Ping, chairman of the Arab-Asian Forum, signed a memorandum of understanding that formalised an agreement between the non-governmental pan-Arab organisation and local Singaporean businesses.
The memorandum will bring Arab students sponsored by the YAL into Keppel Corp's Singapore or Vietnam-based companies for a three-month internship, and Mr Kabeesh hopes to see Singapore students doing the same in the Middle East with various partner corporations.
'We are exposing them to the real world where they will be working so that they can see how things operate outside their local area,' explained Mr Kabeesh.
'Most of these students probably have never travelled away from their home country, let alone been to Singapore, and you need the future business leaders (from the Middle East) to understand the Asian culture, and vice versa, to have a healthy business relationship in the future.'
He added: 'After the end of the Arab-Asian Forum in April 2007, we wanted to undertake initiatives that would help to benefit businesses and youth from both regions, and build bridges between the two societies, because we believe that the relationship between the Arabic world and Asian society will grow stronger in the foreseeable future.
'At the end of the day, something had to come out of that forum session and this internship programme is it.'
The birth of the Young Arab Leaders organisation grew from an initiative undertaken in 2004 by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-president and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai.
The non-political, non-governmental organisation was given the mandate of supporting and training university students and young professionals in the pan-Arab community by giving them the necessary skills to survive in today's job market, and to encourage and mentor SME entrepreneurs within the Middle East.
This article was first published in The Business Times on 15 July 2008.
